A post-colonial and Marxist reading of Drawings for Projections: the South African landscape

In the essay “A Procession of the Dispossessed” (included in William Kentridge, 1999), art curator Dan Cameron focuses on Kentridge’s approach to the South African landscape and his political commitments when talking about the drawings series.
The landscape and literature of South Africa’s white settlers harped on the barrenness of their new home, and on its indifference to whether they starved or prospered is a the stereotypical vision of inhumanly empty African landscape. But this is not what Kentridge is interested in showing. Dan Cameron asserts that the artist is actually interested in revealing how in South Africa the balance power between humans and nature is being altered, by being made vulnerable by people and to people. This landscape is the devastated area of South Johannesburg (Figure 6) described as “mine-dumps and slime dumps; pylons and power cables; roads and tracks that lead from nowhere to nowhere.”
Through his drawings and films, Kentridge reflects on the psychological landscape of his Country, which has experienced great upheaval, violence, racial and social injustice, the horrific effects of colonialism and the politics of apartheid, and more recently, the confronting acceptance of responsibility and the telling of truth.
Though grounded in South Africa, his work resonates in more universal ways, exploring the relationship between desire, ethics, and responsibility, our changing notion of history and place, and how one constructs and interprets these histories.
The focus of Kentridge’s films will be upon the formal ingredients of the landscapes themselves, particularly those in the animated film Felix in Exile (1994), produced in the year that South Africa held its first democratic elections.
Even in his discussion with Christov-Bakargiev, Kentridge refers to his relationship with the major traditions of landscape art. He expresses both his engagement with, and refers to his interest in, but frustration with the portrayals of English landscapes of streams and meadows to which he was exposed in his youth:
I felt that the landscape around me was a lie, that I had been cheated. Rather than growing up thinking that these green hills in that book were fiction, I believed they were real. The South African landscape wasn't less real; it was more like a disaster zone.

The landscapes portrayed by Kentridge are seen as psychic burial grounds for mutilated bodies, which disappear into the earth leaving the terrain unchanged.
The most striking visual aspect of Kentridge’s rendering of the South African landscape is, according to Cameron, his way to argue against how historically Africa was represented: the Edenic Paradise, “revealing the strange, contradictory relationship between Western conquest and tribalism that still endures.”
According to Cameron Kentridge emphasizes that the historical oppression of the country’s population has being reinforced by the exploitation of its natural resources. The landscape surrounding characters like Soho, Felix and Mrs. Eckstein in Kentridge’s films is as divorced from reality as the millions whose they ignore.

The landscape work of William Kentridge displays not only an artistic project strongly permeated with a sense of inhabiting a country of one's own, but also a sense of the price paid for human ownership itself and the way in which this threatens the natural world. The dead and dying earth and its manifestations inscribed in Felix in Exile (1994) act as powerful reminders of the especially close connection between human and environmental exploitation in South Africa's history. Dan Cameron describes a more specific Marxist approach to the landscape’s representation in Drawings for Projection in his analysis of Mine.

Landscape becomes a space of visible and invisible social conflicts, a place of exploration, manslaughter, and murder. If remembering means to read traces that demands imagination, attentiveness of the gaze, construction, and this is especially visible in how Kentridge treats the Johannesburg landscape. Landscape becomes a space of visible and invisible social conflicts.
The film Mine shows the depth dimension, as well as the exploitative structure of this landscape, where the main character Soho Eckstein gains visual access to brutal reality of mine labor only through the surreal metamorphosis of his cafetière into a power drill. The cafetière as drill imaginatively translates the relation of capital to labor, establishing a visual link from the above to the below.
From Soho’s table, the cafetière drills downward, penetrating the surface of the earth all the way down to the tunnel of mine, and revealing the workers’ world made out of galleries, workers’ showers, rooms that remind us the photographs of Nazis camp in Dachau. Or in other scenes the layout of the mine’s tunnels and galleries from above become similar to the layout of the sleeping quarters of captured slaves on a slave ship during the middle passages.

Kentridge said about his way to portrait South African landscape and Johannesburg in particular:

I’m really interested in the terrain’s hiding of its own history, and the correspondence this had […] with the way memory works. The difficulty we have in holding on to passions, impressions, ways of seeing things, the way that things that seem so indelibly imprinted on our memories still fade and become elusive, is mirrored in the way in which the terrain itself cannot hold on to the events played out upon it.

On the other hand, Kentridge, as a product of white privileges (shared with characters like Soho) is very uncomfortable with exploitation of people and places enacted by his predecessor. Mine (1991), in this sense, can be written as an effort to reestablish a hidden connection between workers and owner of the mine. In a way, it is like Kentridge is trying to resolve a conflict with his past trying to give a more human dimension to Soho.